Free to Read: Women Across China Say They Are Getting Calls About Their Pregnancy Plans

As the country’s population shrinks, local governments are doing more to monitor fertility and encourage childbearing

Women around China have taken to social media to share their experiences of receiving calls asking about their reproductive plans. Photo: AI generated

In the months that followed her marriage last September, Lizi received repeated phone calls from her community. They had one question: “Are you pregnant yet?”

Already frustrated by the pressure to have a child coming from her relatives, the young woman living in East China’s Fujian province finally told the caller she had no plans to get pregnant this year.

However, after a break of a few months, the calls started again last week. She didn’t pick up.

【Subscribe now to unlock more coverage about China’s birth rate shrinking.】

Lizi’s experience reflects a growing trend across China. Grassroots workers — either working for local government offices or for official residents’ committees known as “juweihui” — are reaching out to women of childbearing age to ask about their reproductive plans.

Many women took to social media to share their experience, with some asking “is the government now telling (grassroots workers) to urge people to have kids?”

In September, Liu Chen was called by a worker from the community that contains her former workplace, who asked whether she had plans to have children. The unmarried resident of Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, told Caixin that she felt offended by the question.

These phone calls are part of broader measures that aim to monitor fertility and provide related services, Caixin has learned. China’s birthrate has fallen to low levels in recent years, prompting the authorities to drop their decades-long campaign of limiting population growth to promoting a “fertility-friendly” society.

The process

When couples register for their marriage certificate or a woman gives birth at a hospital, their information will be sent to local family planning offices, a deputy director of a county-level family planning office in Shandong province told Caixin.

The information is then forwarded to neighborhood-level workers, who would contact the newlyweds or new mothers, the official said.

A 2020 document issued by the Shandong provincial health commission on population monitoring called on neighborhood-level administrative bodies to collect information on women of childbearing age and report the data to higher-level offices.

The family development department of a county-level health bureau in Shandong confirmed that marriage and fertility data is gathered and reported on a monthly, quarterly and yearly basis. They contact relevant individuals via phone call, the internet, or in-person interactions, a staff told Caixin.

However, a village Communist Party secretary in Kangding, seat of Sichuan’s largely rural Garze Tibetan autonomous prefecture, said that they had not felt pressure from higher authorities to promote childbearing, adding that village health workers only call women to offer free health checkups if they’re planning to get pregnant. “If someone wants to have children, they will; if they don’t, no one would dare force them,” he said.

Another provincial-level health commission official told Caixin that neither central nor local governments have set specific targets for birth rates. A community worker in Jinan, capital of Shandong province, said their recent family planning efforts have focused on distributing subsidies to new parents.

China’s fertility rate has been on a steady decline since 2017, with the population shrinking in both 2022 and 2023. As of June this year, more than 30 Chinese cities have provided subsidies and incentives to encourage mothers to have more children.